Laura Blum

The king in A Hologram for the King is Saudi Arabia’s, and the hologram involves the Boston sales exec who pitches it to his royal highness. Alan Clay’s the name. Every bit the emotional golem that would suggest, he is America itself, a creature of the corporate mud.

Will our has-been marketer win the bid to supply telecommunications to the King’s Metropolis of Economy and Trade megaproject? It doesn’t much matter, because in this film by Tom Tykwer, he’s played by Tom Hanks — and because his real task is to reconnect with his mojo and his heart. 

The American Dream Clay has been living is not terribly dreamy. With the United States economy in shambles, his best hope lies overseas. That hope comes down to a royal nephew he once met who can offer entree in landing the big contract. Insha’Allah.  

Day after useless day, Clay and his team are kept waiting by the desert’s kingmakers including the King. It’s during that dry stretch that Clay takes to drinking moonshine, oversleeping and hiring a cab to the future city, an hour’s drive from his Jeddah hotel. The cabbie (Alexander Black) will also take him along a rocky path to friendship.

However cloddish Clay’s cross-cultural communications skills, his interactions back home are no smoother. There’s the matter of his daughter’s college tuition, which he can’t afford to pay, and of the bad blood with his ex-wife, who says he lacks ambition. “My penance for blowing it is being here,” Hanks’ desert castaway imagines telling his daughter.

When an attractive expat (Sidse Babett Knudsen) comes on to him at a company party, he’s hard-pressed to respond. The only skin Clay is touching is his own, as when he lances a lump on his back that he blames for his doldrums. “Are you on…Prozac?” asks the female surgeon who treats him and with whom he quickly connects. 

It’s enjoyable to watch Tom Hanks grappling with the Middle East and still more so when its agent is Sarita Choudhury’s good doctor. Shifting from the arid desert sands to the vibrant Red Sea, the film makes a fitting platform for the launching of Clay’s romance. Yet, like the Dave Eggers book it’s based on, the screen version blows hot and cold, wistful and funny, alienated and romantic.

Reconciling these varied tonalities is one of the challenges that award-winning film editor Alexander Berner took on for his fourth collaboration with Tykwer. Berner, who recently became head of the German film editors guild, had previously cut the director’s Jupiter Ascending, Cloud Atlas and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. To learn more about Berner’s process, I reached him by Skype at his Digital Editors office in Munich:

http://www.thalo.com/articles/view/1209/tribeca_spotlight_film_editor_alexander_berner